Okay, I confess I’m a bit behind in posting this — the scene came out last week — but I’ve been consumed by the drama of the presidential election (as evidenced by my two new Huffington Post articles on the subject). But better late than never, right? So if you’re stressed out about Tuesday night, why not blow off some steam and watch me and Lorenzo Flexx in Parole, available exclusively from TitanMen!

The first scene starring Anthony and Bennett is out now. You can watch a free preview and see tons of action and behind-the-scenes pictures from their scene below, then stream or download the entire scene with your TitanMen membership. Not a member? Sign up now for instant access to this and thousands of other videos that you can download and keep forever.

Watch the TitanMen website for Bruce and Eddy’s scene coming on October 19, then mine and Lorenzo’s on October 26!

Share this:

Happy National Coming Out Day! Here’s my coming out story. I don’t think I’ve ever shared this before, but here goes. When I was 20 and studying in Japan, I was basically in love with my best friend… who, unfortunately, was straight. And a fundamentalist Christian. That in itself led to a particularly thorny couple of years involving a ex-gay ministry, which I’ve already written about in case you’d like to read it (see http://huff.to/1yXDCaY). But what I didn’t mention in that article is that before I came out to my best friend, I’d written a letter to a man I’d never actually met.

His name was Todd, and when I was in high school, he spoke to our entire class during a special assembly. He was a teacher at a neighboring high school — he taught English, if I remember correctly — and although he told us his last name, he told us just to call him Todd. He was the first openly gay man I’d ever really heard speaking about his experiences at length. He started the lecture by asking people to shout out any derogatory names they’d heard for gay people. Most of them I won’t repeat here; if this story ever makes it to Facebook, I’m afraid I’d be banned because Facebook’s anti-hate-speech engine doesn’t understand context. But suffice it to say, there were the usual suspects: “queer,” “f–got,” “fudge packer…” I even remember one person saying “square donut,” which drew a laugh from the assembled crowd. But then Todd turned it around, and asked us to imagine what it would feel like if those same words were hurled at us as insults, or even threats. It was a very powerful moment. The whole speech was very moving, and at times touching… like when Todd related coming out to his grandmother, who replied, “Well, sweetheart, even Jesus didn’t have any children.” I was closeted and rather terrified of coming out at the time, so I didn’t have the courage to speak to him afterwards, but the entire experience stuck with me and I’ve never forgotten it.

Fast forward three years, and I’m back in Japan, in love with my best friend who couldn’t love me back in the way that I longed for. I was wrestling with those feelings of loneliness and fear that we’ve all experienced at some time or another, compounded by the isolation of being 7,000 miles from home. So before I came out to my friend, I wrote a letter to Todd and addressed it to him at his high school. My tone was at once lonely, desperate, and oddly apologetic. It was a bit clinical as well: I remember using the word “homosexual” instead of “gay” (I used phrases like “I’ve suspected I was a homosexual since I was 12 years old”). I repeatedly asked Todd if there was something wrong with me. If I was normal.

About a month later, Todd’s response arrived by airmail (this was 1993, and email wasn’t particularly prevalent yet). It was handwritten. It took me about a week to open it, because part of me believed that the letter would confirm my worst fears: that I was, in fact, damaged. I half-expected the letter to contain punishing language, chastising me for what I assumed was my deviant soul. The reality, of course, was the opposite. The best word I can use to describe Todd’s letter is “soothing.” He reassured me that being gay is in fact okay, and even better, that there’s a huge network of support out there. He sympathized with my loneliness, and while he didn’t know of any support groups in Osaka, he gave me a phone number for an LGBT support line back home in Boston. He encouraged me to hang in there until I came home, assured me that things would get better, and told me that if I ever needed to reach him, he’d be there for me and do whatever he could.

Sadly, I didn’t write back.

If you haven’t read the Huffington Post article I linked to earlier, here’s a quick summary of what happened next. I wasn’t quite able to hang in there. I continued to fall head-over-heels for my friend, to the point of trying to convert to Christianity just so I wouldn’t feel so damn alone. I tried as hard as I could, but in my heart of hearts knew I was wasn’t being true to who I really was inside. The conversion therapy didn’t work — it never does — and I spent several years recovering from the effects that the ex-gay ministry had on me. I’d chosen the wrong path… but the right one was still waiting for me, and I’m now happy to be out and proud and comfortable with myself, even if it took me a few extra years to get there.

Anyway, that’s my coming out story. Maybe a few of you can relate, or are in a situation now like I was back then. I also just want to say that Todd was right, you’re not alone, and there is tons of support out there. You can read other coming out stories and find your local LGBT peer group by visiting the It Gets Better Project website at ItGetsBetter.org. And remember to love yourself, stay true to yourself, and above all, trust your heart.

– Jesse

P.S. Todd, I know it’s a long shot, and I don’t know how to reach you anymore, but if you happen to be reading this: THANK YOU. You gave me hope when I needed it most, even though I didn’t know it at the time.

Share this:

Note: I originally wrote this article for Huffington Post on October 10, 2016. You can find it on the HuffPost website here.

When I was a kid, I used to like to play SimCity. Actually… that’s misleading. I didn’t exactly play it. I didn’t have the patience to build cities from scratch or try to manage one of the fully-developed ones that came with the game. Instead, I would load a pre-made city — Boston was my favorite — and unleash as many disasters on it as I could. Earthquakes, tornadoes… there was even a Godzilla! What can I say… I was only 15 at the time and that sort of stuff was fun to watch. Then I’d delight in the destruction that I had caused, quit the game (without saving), and come back and do it again.

That’s what I’m reminded of when I hear people talk about electing Donald Trump as a “destabilizing force” who will “blow up Washington” and build a new, presumably better system in its place. I understand the rationale, in theory — burn down what you perceive as a broken system so that a phoenix may rise from its ashes — but I have a couple of problems with that. First, is Trump really a good choice to do the rebuilding? Does he have the experience required to handle what would be a monumentally complex and delicate task? And how he envisions this “America Reborn” is still maddeningly unclear to me. He says it’s supposed to be great again, but that’s really all we know. Where are the specifics? I’m not sure Donald himself knows the answer to that question.

Second, and more importantly, is that I believe that our current system of government, for the most part, works. Yeah, it’s not perfect… far from it, in fact. Watching the Congressional deadlock over the last six years has been excruciating, and our economic recovery from the Great Recession isn’t as fast as many would like it to be. But our country is by and large successful, it’s resilient, and in the course of a measly 240 years — a drop in the historical bucket — we’ve become that “shining city on a hill” that Reagan so optimistically portrayed in 1980, and stayed there. Yeah, we can do better. We can always do better. But we’re already doing pretty damn good, and I believe that to blow it up now would be a devastating blow to our democracy… clearing the way for a demagogue like Trump to fill the ensuing vacuum. But there’s no “King of America” for a reason. Our Founding Fathers envisioned our country as a democracy, not an authoritarian regime. So when Donald Trump uses phrases like “I alone can fix this,” it quite frankly scares the crap out of me.

The kid in me still appreciates the appeal of unleashing Godzilla just to see what happens, and what kind of destruction it would wreak. But America isn’t a simulation. There’s much more at stake here, and you have to live with the consequences of the devastation you unleash. You can’t just hit reset and start again. We should elect a leader who understands that, and knows that while we have to keep improving, we should also appreciate and cherish what we’ve already accomplished and just how far we’ve come.

Share this:

Here’s the scene that a lot of you have been waiting for… TitanMen exclusive Matthew Bosch and featured Titan Man Bruce Beckham in a very hot flip-fuck scene! All that muscle… just… wow. I’d love to be in the middle of a Bruce/Matthew sandwich, wouldn’t you?

Check out the free NSFW preview above and all the action and behind-the-scenes pics below, then watch the entire 42 minute scene here with your TitanMen membership. Not a member? Sign up here for instant access, then stream or download every scene in Titan’s massive library for as little as 32 cents a day!